I've been using a budget-line Compaq laptop which has an AR242x wireless controller from Atheros. It was running out of the box when I first put 8.10 on the system, but future kernel upgrades stopped the drivers from working - so I'd just been booting into an old kernel. After upgrading to 9.04, however, it was working out of the box again - until I rebooted, and presto! the wireless card was no longer detected by the system, even though there was supposedly an active proprietary driver.

I went to the compat-wireless site, downloaded and made the package, and after typing "make load," it appeared to work. Here's what I got.

My networking applet now shows a "wireless networks" tab, but cannot see any networks. Further, I installed the wifi-radar package, to make sure it wasn't somehow a problem with GNOME and not the hardware drivers, and the terminal output says:

Code:

wlan0 Interface doesn't support scanning : Device or resource busy

Does anyone have any idea how I can resolve this issue and get my wireless back up and running? If going back to proprietary drivers will work, I'll do it - but I think that was what was working and stopped for no particular reason.

Your problem seems to depend on some volatile and undocumented bug in the ath5k driver.

I have experienced about the same appearance of "perhaps-functionality" of that new driver when upgrading from 8.04 to 9.04, and decided to revert to the madwifi driver -- which has been removed from the jaunty repositories!

Well I dowloaded the .deb from Debian instead, and the madwifi's driver (ath_pci) does function reliably.

Note: Remember to blacklist ath5k since it is told that they don't like each other!

Update: I did a clean install, and the wireless worked out of box - until I had used it for a couple of hours, then the connection failed and when I disabled and reenabled wireless, it was back to how it was.

I tried installing the ndiswrapper Windows driver, but that gives the same net result. What is wrong here?

toreric

08-04-2009 06:05 AM

Did you check that the ndiswrapper driver does "take the command"? Maybe the default ath5k is still loaded in the kernel and acting just like before?